Collab-Or-Ate

I’m a co-organizer of this workshop at CSCW ‘10, that will be held February 6th. Consider submitting a paper and join us for the discussion. The position papers are due November 20th.

Collective Intelligence In Organizations: Toward a Research Agenda

Workshop webpage: www.parc.com/ciorg

CSCW workshop descriptions: http://www.cscw2010.org/program/workshops.php

When: 6 February 2010

Where: Savannah, Georgia, USA

Description

A new generation of web tools is penetrating organizations after successful adoption within the consumer domain (e.g., social
networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks; wiki-based editing). These tools and the collaborative processes they
support on the large scale are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI).

This workshop will focus on CI tools for collaboration in work-related settings, especially for task forces now increasingly common
in industry and government. The workshop is aimed at refining the problem, summarizing pioneering work on CI in general (i.e.,
exemplars of practices and tools), and ultimately developing a research agenda that specifically addresses the problem of
supporting CI among knowledge workers in organizations. Participants will present studies of task forces suggesting specific design
requirements, CI tools, and/or new methods for empirical or design research on CI.

Call for Participation

The workshop aims to assemble a diverse set of participants with a research or practitioner interest for CI in organizations. Workshop
participants should submit either a position paper (1500-2000 words) or extended paper (up to 8000 words) reporting more substantial research.

Topics of interest include:

– Empirical studies of work practices in organizations: e.g., case studies of task forces illustrating practices and design requirements
– Designs of new software tools or proof-of-concept prototypes supporting CI in task forces, communities; or in-depth evaluations
of tools already deployed that support CI in organization
– Theoretical contributions on collective intelligence, crowd sourcing, and community-based learning in organizations, which can directly
inform design and research
– Cases of multidisciplinary research showing the interplay between field studies, analysis of requirements, and development of CI tools

Dates

– 20 November 2009 — submissions should be sent as a PDF or Word attachment to ciorg@parc.com [2-3 researchers will review each submission; based on a shared evaluation scheme, the reviewers will assess the significance of the contribution, its relevance to the workshop themes, and its clarity]
– 18 December 2009 – notification of acceptance [accepted paper titles will be posted here and shared through a wiki]
– 6 February 2010 — workshop to take place [participants will be asked to prepare a brief summary and read all accepted position papers prior to the workshop]

Workshop Organizers

Gregorio Convertino, PARC

Antonietta Grasso, Xerox Research Centre Europe

Joan DiMicco, IBM Research

Giorgio De Michelis, University of Milano – Bicocca

Ed H. Chi, PARC

Due to the arrival of a certain Baby DiMicco on Oct 6th, I now only get things done if they take me less than 5 minutes to complete. During one of my five minutes today I was able to skim the Most Emailed Stories on the NYTimes, and now I’m trying to use another one of my five minutes to share the links with you. We will see how long this takes me to write!

• 5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook Impression management guide for Facebook hits the NYTimes. “When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we’ve got a problem.” Uh, yes! Glad this is now considered a mainstream problem.
  
  
• Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers Consumers = Producers! Of the next feature set! This is also not news for a Twitter user, but I like it.
  
  

Why IBM created its own social network, and how it’s being used. And since I still have a few minutes, apparently, here’s some self-promotion: I was interviewed by the Financial Times about Beehive (now called “Social Blue”) and the podcast is available. On the Financial Times’ podcast page, it is the Oct 20th podcast.

I spent (wasted) a full week back in April on connecting the right versions of Django, Python, and Postgres together on my Mac (running OS 10.5.7). Now it is September and on a whim, as if I had nothing better to do with my time, I decided to upgrade Python from 2.5 to 2.6, somehow forgetting what a mess this caused last time. Everything broke! Here’s how I put it back together, losing just 1 day this time. Hopefully next time I’ll just read this blog post and either stop in my tracks or use these commands.

First install MacPorts. Back in April this is the path that worked for me for getting Postgresql 8.3 and Python 2.5 talking to each other. It installs software, including dependancies, and then figures out how to get everything to hook together.

Today, to upgrade python from 2.5 to 2.6, you type this MacPorts command:

> sudo port install python26

Then you have to tell your machine that 2.6 is the version you want it to use:

> sudo python_select python26

Then you have to reinstall your current installation of django so that it is attached to 2.6, not 2.5

> cd to-your-Django-install
> python setup.py install

Now you have to reinstall that darned psycopg2 connection between Postgres and Python

> sudo port install py26-psycopg2

That last step can take forever, but be patient, because after this step, you can go back to your Django project and type:

> python manage.py runserver

And it will run your application! YAHOO.

A final last step: configure your Eclipse environment is to tell it to use 2.6 for compilation. Within the Pydev perspective, right-click on your project, click PyDev – project type, and under Interpreter click on “Click here to configure an interpreter not listed.” Then add a new Python Interpreter, which took some poking around, but finally “/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framwork/Versions/2.6/bin/python2.6″ worked (but isn’t what is finally displayed in the window).

Helpful resources:
- Stack Overflow is a pretty useful site and this post helped: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1213690/what-is-the-most-compatible-way-to-install-python-modules-on-a-mac
- MacPorts download site: http://www.macports.org/
- Some terminal commands I found useful
> sudo port installed (tells you what you have installed)
> locate psycopyg (tells you where you have this driver installed — about 1,000,000 places in my case)

Later this month at Communities & Technologies 2009, findings on Beehive and social capital will be presented. I did this research with Chip Steinfield, Nicole Ellison, and Cliff Lampe, colleagues at Michigan State. Chip, Nicole and Cliff have done tons of research on Facebook, found in their interesting set of papers.

The four pictures shown here are from Beehive and show IBM employees all around the world going bowling. There are so many pictures just like this shared on Beehive, highlighting coworkers informally socializing and having fun together. In terms of social capital, we hypothesized that this type of informal sharing and communicating on Beehive could be associated with closer bonds with coworkers and increased access to distant colleagues.

By adapting the survey instrument Chip, Nicole and Cliff use for measuring Facebook intensity and social capital to the IBM & Beehive context, we found that even with limited use of Beehive, over a relatively short amount of time, there are associations between types of usage and different types of social capital:

• When someone is using Beehive for meeting new contacts, they report a greater interest in making these types of contacts at the company in general.
• When someone is using Beehive for keeping up with known colleagues, both in their workgroup and in their extended network of loose ties, they report having closer ties with their immediate network (bonding social capital), a higher sense of citizenship (willingness to help the greater good of the company), and greater access to both new people and expertise within the company.
• And finally, the more intensely someone uses Beehive (meaning more frequent visits and stronger associations with the community on the site) the higher they report their social capital is, across all measures. They have closer bonds to their network, they have a greater willingness to contribute to the company, they have a greater interest in connecting globally, have greater access to new people, and a greater ability to access expertise.

The paper is Bowling Online: Social Networking and Social Capital Within the Organization and the official abstract is below:

Social capital facilitates knowledge management in organizations by enabling individuals to locate useful information, draw on resources and make contributions to the community. This paper explores the relationship between social capital and use of an internal social network site in a multinational organization. We hypothesize that SNS use contributes to social capital within the organization by enabling users to form networks of heterogeneous contacts and maintain and deepen existing relationships. Survey findings show that bonding relationships, sense of corporate citizenship, interest in connecting globally, and access to new people and expertise are all associated with greater intensity of SNS use.

The full conference program includes a lot of interesting papers.

I’ve been invited to Enterprise 2.0 to participate on a panel called Lessons Learned From Internal Communities. It will be moderated by Peter Kim and here is the abstract:

Forget the theory. Proof exists that internal communities work. Today’s media continues to hype the rise and fall of public social networks, leaving many managers to question whether community has a business application. However, smart companies have already implemented internally focused collaboration platforms that offer the best of external functionality with the appeal of a network with dedicated business focus.

This session will highlight the lessons learned from three professionals who are responsible for internal community efforts: Joan DiMicco from IBM Research, Jamie Pappas from EMC, and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte.

I’m excited for it because myself, Jamie Pappas from EMC and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte are going to share the stories we’ve heard and seen first hand from our respective internal social networking communities (Beehive, EMC One, and D Street). When the three of us have chatted we’ve discovered that many of the IBM, EMC and Deloitte stories are the same:

• High adoption rates: employees use these sites more than traditional intranet directories and information repositories
• Viral adoption and word of mouth drives adoption, more so than top-down requirements and instructions to join.
• Appropriate behavior: each company has thought through issues of inappropriate content in detail and provides guidelines to the users, but for the most part (we’re talking ~99.9%), employees know what is right and wrong to say on these company-internal tools
• The list of benefits of these tools goes on and on, centered around the theme of people connecting with each other. Some of our top benefits:
  • humanizing the workplace
  • finding informal information
  • expertise location
  • assisting new hires and acquired employees integrate
  • crossing information silos
  • providing a forum for employees to share their opinions with management.

If you’ll be at Enterprise 2.0, please stop by! (The panel is Tuesday, June 23, 1-2pm.)

I was going to write this great step-by-step guide to getting Windows applications running on a Mac when I discovered those instructions have already been written by Apple: Boot Camp Installation and Setup Guide. I highly recommend reading and following them! (I didn’t and had to start the whole process over twice.)

In the end, here’s what I did:

1. using the Boot Camp Assistant already installed by default on my Mac, created a 10 GB partition on my Mac for Windows.
2. started from within BCA, installed Windows XP on that partition. (This is where the Apple guide comes in very handy.)
3. rebooted a dozen times while Windows did its thing with all the updates and patches and what-not. (All the things you didn’t think you’d ever have to deal with again because you live on a Mac now.)
4. on the PC, installed the PC applications I wanted (SPSS in this case)
5. on the Mac, installed VMWare Fusion so that I can run the PC partition from within the Mac partition. (VMWare Fusion does the same thing as Parallels.) At this point the PC was running within a single window on the Mac.
6. clicked on that amazing “Unity” button within VMWare Fusion, and voila, the PC applications are now running along side my Mac applications.

Mission Accomplished: a PC-licensed copy of SPSS is living along side a Mac-licensed copy of MSOffice (Excel and Word).

Tomorrow, at the ACM Group conference, Rosta Farzan, PhD is going to be presenting a paper on the work we did together last summer.

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, B Brownholtz. (2009) “Spreading the Honey: A System for Maintaining an Online Community.” Full Paper, Proceedings of the ACM GROUP Conference, May 2009.

Last summer, when Beehive had been running for a full year, it had plenty of content — 100,000 pieces of content, in fact. So we realized the problem on the site was not generating new content, but rather finding the existing, interesting content. This problem is usually tackled in a few different ways: by displaying lists of recent content and most-viewed content (which we already did on Beehive) and by asking users to rate or vote on the best content.

We decided to design a custom system that encouraged a larger group of users to participate in the process of rating content than one usually sees in standard rating systems. We did this by picking a rotating board of users that has the power for one week to give “honey” to content they liked. Each board is picked based on their activity on the site and you can’t serve on the board more than once every four weeks.

We feel strongly that having a diverse group of users involved in selecting the best content brings a richness and diversity to the promoted content that reflects more of the IBM community. Because the Beehive community is large (>50,000) and IBM is even larger (>300,000), we didn’t want to have a small, and in some ways elite, group of enthusiastic raters driving up the visibility of a small set of content. Rather, we wanted to have the power to promote content distributed over a larger group, over a longer period of time.

To find out more about the system and, IMHO, impressive results, read the paper! The screenshot to the right is what you see on the home page of Beehive every time you log in and it shows you the content that this week’s “honey bees” picked as the best of the best.

My blog is a Wordpress blog and I have been running into issues (bugs) with my Wordpress plug-ins. The manifestation of the bug is that I can’t log into my blog — kind of annoying and a showstopper. The only way to fix it is to disable all the plug-ins. So now I’m leery of all my Wordpress plug-ins and looking for alternatives, so I don’t have to reinstall any of them. Enter twitterfeed! To keep my Twitter followers up to date on my blog posts, twitterfeed is perfect.



My other current favorite little tool is foxmarks. I have it running on my work laptop, my old work laptop, and my home desktop. It not only syncs bookmarks but also saved passwords. So I can log into my blog from my home computer with my obscure auto-generated password, even though I’ve never done it from this computer before and I don’t know what the password is.

I’ll be talking for five minutes at O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 5 event, tomorrow (Feb 12). Can you guess which time slot I have? 7:15pm. I’m personally looking forward to hearing what the 7:45pm speaker says though.

I can’t believe this, but the page doesn’t say where the event is being held! It is at Hooley House near Faneuil Hall, at 25 Union St, Boston, MA, 02108

As I’ve mentioned before, approximately 100% of the search engine visits to my blog are from people looking for some information related to the Blackberry Pearl and how to sync it to Notes. Well, I have an update for all of you: I’ve switched. I’m now an iPhone user. It is now official: There will be NO MORE Blackberry Pearl posts here! Except for my final thoughts….

The two phones can’t really be compared to each other. The iPhone is closer to a computer, while the Pearl is good at being an email checker. I won’t bother waxing poetic about how great the iPhone is and how every application that exists on the BB has a way better equivalent on the iPhone, because I don’t want to make you jealous. :) Suffice it to say that it is awesome and I love it.

But to compare it to the Blackberry, I can give some insights. In terms of syncing with your address book and calendar, it is all pretty easy if you have joined the Mac cult and you use both a Mac and an iPhone. I don’t sync the iPhone to Lotus Notes because I got out of that habit when Notes 8.0 broke syncing to the Blackberry. I sync to the Mac’s Address Book and Google Calendar.

Here were some surprises for me:

• There is no built-in bluetooth syncing with your Mac or over-the-air syncing with Google applications.
• If you want to sync with Google Calendars, they may tell you at the Apple Store it isn’t possible, but it is with NuevaSync. Read this Apple Blog post to set it up.
• The iPhone’s Contacts easily synced with the Mac’s Address Book, but it did not intelligently merge any contacts.

Things I do miss about the Pearl:

• The instantaneous push email. I now have to actually touch the mail icon on my iPhone to find out if I got email. I miss the pulsing red light that tells me my phone needs me.
• The battery life is better on the Pearl. I have to charge my iPhone at least every 48 hours.
• My Pearl was comfortably dented and scratched after 2 years of wear, so I didn’t live in fear of scratching it more. I dread the day I drop my beautiful iPhone.

I would like to install Lotus Notes, Sametime, and even Connections on my iPhone, but am not sure when I’ll find the time to do it.

The WSJ article “Genes and the Friends you Make” reports that genetics play a factor in the structure of your social network, specifically the in-degree, transitivity, and the centrality of your network:

The scientists looked at how many students in the longitudinal study named a given student as a friend, which it termed “in-degree” affinity; how many students a given student named as friends (out-degree affinity); what the odds were of a given student’s friends knowing each other (transitivity); and how central or peripheral to a network a given student might be (centrality).

The researchers found that in-degree, transitivity and centrality are “significantly heritable.” This means that your genetic background may help determine not only how many people count you as a friend, but also how many of your friends are friends among themselves. This sheds light on the kind of social network you inhabit, and whether your presence is central to it, or not.

There are related studies that find that levels of innovation, obesity, smoking and depression can be linked to who you are friends with. If we break apart the causal link between genetics and innovation/obesity/smoking/depression research outcomes, we might find that it isn’t your genes, but rather your genetically pre-determined set of friends that are influencing the course of your life. Better break the genetic determinism by stepping up that Facebook friending!

Glad to hear at least one company that doesn’t make money yet is able to get venture funding! Twitter, which turned down an offer from Facebook, is getting more venture funding, according to this Washington Post article. The article is little more than a rumor, but interesting. Apparently, Twitter has passed Digg in number of weekly visits.

I maintain that because Twitter’s earliest adopters were adults, not teenagers or college kids, it is in a much better position to find a profitable business model compared to other social network services. Not only are Twitter’s core users in the business of web 2.0, they are using Twitter to support their work. It is only a matter of time before Twitter figures out how to make money off of that.

As I fill my calendar with 2009 project meetings, it is good to be reminded about good meeting practices:

• Whoever calls a meeting should be explicit about its objectives.
• Everyone should think carefully about the opportunity costs of a meeting. Do you really need one?
• After productive or unproductive meetings, assign credit or blame to the person in charge.

Please, don’t just call a meeting and hope the magic happens. Take charge and take personal responsibility for meeting its objectives, whatever they are.

From NYTimes’ Preoccupations column, 1/17/09

The NYTimes has an article today about how the Obama administration (official now!) could make careers in academic research easier for women. The main suggestion is to change the policies around allowing family leave while on research grants. In the familiar theme of Obama-will-fix-everything-wrong-in-this-world, the article is optimistic that good things are about to happen. But also, a lot has happened within our lifetime already!

In 1973, only 6 percent of the Ph.D. scientists employed full time in academia, business or elsewhere were women; by 2006 the number had risen to 27 percent. Over that same time frame, women’s share of full professorships in the sciences quadrupled, to about 20 percent.

Encouraging girls and women to pursue science and technical careers is very important to me, because I was encouraged by high school teachers and summer programs (not to mention my parents) to pursue math and science. In college, I majored in math, but not before dropping out of a physics major, where I had became discouraged and felt ignored. (Apparently physics is a real problem area for retaining women.) Math (applied math, specifically) was a good choice for me in the end and I think everything definitely worked out. But if I had not had that early encouragement in high school, I wouldn’t be working where I am now, or doing what I’m doing.

For the sake of supporting women’s choices throughout their career, let’s hope Obama makes some key changes and appointments.

This is not the most interesting blog post, but I need to make public my personal notes on what papers were interesting at HICSS. So here is the list, with my short summaries and links to the papers.

Agents of Diffusion – Insights from a Survey of Facebook Users, Rebecca Ermecke, Philip Mayrhofer, Stefan Wagner

On viral adoption on Facebook

Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter, Courtenay Honeycutt, Susan C. Herring

How people use the @ reply mechanism in Twitter. Did you know that 30% of messages get replies?

A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community, Eric Gleave, Howard T. Welser, Thomas M. Lento, Marc A. Smith

A theoretical paper on determing social roles in an online community. Best paper award for the Track.

Hello Stranger! A Study of Introductory Communication Structure and Social Match Success, Daphne R. Raban, Stephen T. Ricken, Sukeshini A., Grandhi, Nathaniel Laws, and Quentin Jones

Social introductions.

Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging, Yannick Assogba, Judith Donath

Overview of the mycrocosm service.

Cyber Migration: An Empirical Investigation on Factors that Affect Users’ Switch Intentions in Social Networking Sites, Cheng Zengyan, Yang Yinping, John Lim

What triggers migration between different social network sites?

A Life Cycle Model of Virtual Communities, Elham Mousavidin, Lakshmi Goel

The lifecycle and stages of an online community

Knowledge Workers and the Realm of Social Tagging, Ralph Boeije, Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten, Pieter de Vries, Wim Veen

Social tagging by workers.

Groupware for Design: an Interactive System to Facilitate Creative Processes in Team Design Work, Arjun Venkataswamy, Rajinder Sodhi, Yerkin Abdildin, Brian P. Bailey

How do you design groupware that is specifically supposed to support the creative process of team design work?

Cultural Diversity, Perception of Work Atmosphere, and Task Conflict in Collaboration Technology Supported Global Virtual Teams: Findings from a Laboratory Experiment, Souren Paul, Sumati Ray

I already blogged about this one and how it is an interesting finding about conflict and cultural differences in distributed teams.

Blogs Are Echo Chambers: Blogs Are Echo Chambers, Eric Gilbert, Tony Bergstrom and Karrie Karahalios

Are bloggers talking to like-minded bloggers?

Employee Adoption of Corporate Blogs: A Quantitative Analysis, Sunil Wattal, Pradeep Racherla, Munir Mandviwalla

Model of when/why employees start blogging.

Monetizing the Internet: Surely There Must be Something other than Advertising, Eric K. Clemons

Great title and interesting discussion of some other possibilities for making money on the internet, besides through advertising.

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